


Diamonds and Stars

by SpoonerizeSwiftness (SplickedyHat)



Series: EXCLUSIVE: scandal of the SWEEP!!  Pale porn stars IN LOVE??! [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (literally), Infection, Injury, M/M, No Sex, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1769956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/SpoonerizeSwiftness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Normally you’d get a warning for a shoot a couple of days in advance—you’re important enough you could even say no to one or two before people started bitching about it.  Bonus of being imperially sanctioned.  But Capricorn's a celebrity and you’re a celebrity and in the end, his agents apparently don’t want to wait any more than yours do.</p><p>The porn’s not going to fucking make itself.</p><p>(AKA "That Pale Porn Stars AU")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You wake up because your palmhusk is going off in really close proximity to your auricular sponge clot and making your horns hurt.  You slap at it awkwardly and manhandle it up to somewhere approximately around your face, and the first thing you hear is your agent’s high-pitched, breathless voice (why does she have to get so much  _louder_ when she’s excited?).

“ _Karkat,_ ” she says, and you start to bristle for a second before you remind yourself who you’re talking to.  You know her.  Hell, you even kind of like her.  She can call you by your first name, if she has to.  “Karkat!   _Sugar you will not_ believe _the deal I just got._ ”

“Mmngh,” you say, because hell, you just checked the clock on your palmhusk and it’s a few hours before sunset and you are  _so fucking tired._  

“You’ve got another shoot,” she says, and you’re about to start growling at her for real because  _what the fuck that’s nothing new people are_ lining the fuck up  _to shoot with me—_  But she lowers her voice and goes on, like it’s a big secret, and you have to shut up to hear her.

“You have a shoot,” she says, slowly, “…with  _Capricorn._ ”

—

Normally you’d get a warning for a shoot a couple of days in advance—you’re important enough you could even say no to one or two before people started bitching about it.  Bonus of being imperially sanctioned.  But he’s a celebrity and you’re a celebrity and in the end, his agents apparently don’t want to wait any more than yours do.

The porn’s not going to fucking make itself.  You’re on set the next afternoon with a folder full of info in your hands.

You wander off while they arrange the set—you’re not needed for this part, anyway.  It doesn’t make a difference to you where they put what, with you working so much off of improvisation.  So you find an odd corner, settle down, and open up the folder to get a look at what you’re going to be working with.

First thing of all is the profile of the troll you’re going to spend tonight papping.

You don’t have a picture of the guy’s face, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve been having you watch his videos for ages and you know approximately what he looks like.  He’s one of the only other imperially-sanctioned pale stars in the empire, constantly competing with your videos for views.  (You’re still number one, but it’s way too fucking close.)  His skills, as far as you can tell, involve primarily being really really good at selling his emotional and physical distress as totally genuine.  He’s also naturally built for the job; thin and tall and fragile-looking.  Elegant horns, but yellow and soft-looking—you couldn’t tell in the videos if it was actual malnutrition or just a convincing paintjob.    Big, sad, purple eyes.  And he has this…trick…of making himself hunch down and look smaller.  It makes him look a lot more fragile and timid. 

And then there’s the really convincing way he lashes out and almost claws peoples’ eyes out when he’s startled in mid-scene.

Actually you’re not sure how much of his persona is acting and how much is him being genuinely unstable.  You’re not actually all that worried either way—99% of the time you’re acting, yeah, but once or twice you’ve had someone genuinely flip out in the middle of a shoot, and you’ve dealt with that as easily as if they were acting.  Brought them right down.  Easy as fuck. 

Almost boring, really.

Back to the character, though.  You’re a visitor, looking for your kismesis, and you walk into the wrong place—find this desperate, exhausted shut-in and clean him up real good.  You give his profile a cursory glance, and then do a double-take and give it a longer one.  God, could they pile this shit on any heavier?  There’s making stuff up and then there’s globes-out lying.  Like hell the guy is _actually_ —

…abandoned by his lusus…sopor addiction…touch-starved…devout cultist…uncontrollable rages…

Holy shit, you couldn’t make the guy sound like more of a mess if you tried.

There’s a sudden rise in the level of noise behind you, and you turn to look over a stack of boxes and film and shit to look at the set.  There’s a crowd gathered around one side of it, all of them in a circle around this big skinny, lanky figure with curvy horns that poke out over the crowd around it.  It turns slightly—you catch a glimpse of a white-painted face, a wild tangle of hair and a baggy, beat-up black jacket with a stylized purple sign on the shoulder.

Oh.  It’s tonight’s moirail.

You can’t see much of him, but he seems to have come already dressed for the part—the ragged, too-big clothes, the mess of his hair…he’s painted up, even.  Not very well, but you think you see a sort of pained grimace on his face when somebody takes a rag to the paint, smearing it up.  Maybe he takes better care of it normally.  Ugh, and this is supposed to turn into a shower shoot—you’re going to be finding greasepaint in under your nails for weeks. 

The other thing you notice is that he’s even skinnier than he looked on his profile folder; rawboned, fragile and lanky.  You know he’s very tall, and he’s still probably stronger than you are, but he looks surpassingly breakable.  It’s an art-form, you suppose.  If he wasn’t good at putting on the vulnerable act he wouldn’t open himself up for papping, and he wouldn’t be the second-most searched-for name in the industry.  

As though to remind you sharply of how much of this is engineered, someone comes into the shot just then and reaches up to his face; he tilts his head down and lets them smudge dirt onto his cheek over his already-smeared makeup—he winces again, and hunches like he wants to pull his face away from their hand.  Genuine cultist then, at least that part of his profile was true. 

That changes things a little.  It’s dangerous, honestly—subversive, even.  A mutantblood like you, even a famous one, taking care of a purpleblood cultist…going as far as fucking  _taking his paint off_ , if your guess is correct.  They can’t very well want you to clean him up but leave his face untouched.  (Actually they can, but that would be way up there on the list of dumbest things your director has ever told you to do.) 

“ _…trance or something,_ ” someone is explaining, a few feet away in a hissing whisper you would have to be deaf not to hear.  You jump and look away from your new moirail, dragging yourself out of your thoughts. “… _not to be disturbed.  So basically, fuck off._ ”

“Yeah, but I’m not deaf, either!” you snap, and glare up at them.   It’s one of your agents—toadying little douchebag, you’ve never liked him.  He’s talking to someone you don’t know, but by the mark on his nametag you’re pretty sure he’s with your temporary palemate’s little squad of makeup artists, agents, handlers and bodyguards. 

It’s not that you don’t  _get_  why you have people hanging around making sure nobody comes near you while you’re zoned out.  You’re one of the empress’s favorites, after all, your videos have gone all over the empire.  You’ve had more than your fair share of desperate stalkers who think you’re the only one to shoosh them and take it really badly when instead of crumpling down and soothing them you call security, draw your sickles and tell them to fuck off.  You get why they’re there.  They’re just…patronizing assholes.

“Oh, uh…” you can see the guy not knowing how to deal with you.  He settles on being a patronizing shithead.  His mistake.  Patronizing shitheads, you know how to deal with.  You’d bet he’s only been around when you’re in scenes before now—he leans down to you like he’s talking to a wriggler and talks really  _sweetly_ at you.  God.  “…well, I’m just trying to get him to give you some peace and quiet before your big scene, Kark—”

“Vantas,” you snap.  “I’m  _Vantas_  to you.  You don’t know me, I don’t know you, I’m sure as fuck not pale for you.  Unless you’ve got enough money to buy me for a private shoot.”

He actually takes a step back.  Then his face does that familiar transformation, from sickly-sweet to bitter and pissed off.

“Oh,” he says, coldly, “…I don’t think they pay me well enough to buy you,  _Vantas_.  You’re one of a kind.  Freaks are expensive.”

“Mm.”  Freak.  Yeah, that’s getting him fired.  You look up at him mildly.  “You should go find one that pays better.”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“Oh,” you say, as sweet as you’ve ever been for a shoot, “…they’re always firing people around here.”

He seems to get your message, because he fucks right off.  Well maybe if he’s that fast on the uptake you’ll let him stick around.  You settle back in and—

“Shooting in five!”

Ugh, shit.  You’re not going to have time to get a drink, are you?  That’s okay, it’s okay.  Doesn’t matter.  You’re going to have plenty of water going everywhere in a bit here, you can catch some of that.  And they get you a drink between most shoots anyway. 

Take a deep breath.

Let it out.

You’re not Karkat Vantas.  You’re not an actor, you’re not famous, you’re nobody special, you’re here to meet your kismesis.  The guy you’re supposed to be doesn’t know he’s about to meet his fated  moirail.  He doesn’t know how to shoosh someone, he’s never had a palemate before. 

You’ve never had a palemate before. 

You’re here to meet your kismesis.  You’re coming up to a door—hivestem, you walked up the stairs to get here, didn’t you?  Look, there’s the door, but the room inside is dark and ( _there aren’t any cameras where the room’s wall should be just a wall there’s just a wall_ ) there’s a troll huddled in the corner in a heap of old clothes and broken furniture, knees pulled up to his thorax, head bowed.

…because here’s the thing about you; when you start a scene, you aren’t  _you_  anymore.  It’s really just, like…a survival mechanism, but you’re pretty sure it’s why they all love you—they can tell that (even if  _you_  know that this is only temporary, that you won’t give a flying fuck about this guy if you meet him tomorrow) this is real.  What you feel about him is real.  Made-up story?  What made-up story?  He got left behind by his lusus, his hair is a tangled mess, he looks on the ragged edge between calm and an emotional breakdown, and you’re moving forward for him before they even tell you they’re shooting. 

He looks up at you, breathing hard and fast and panicked through his nose, opens his mouth to speak and instead of words he comes out with a long, low whine.

“Is this your hive?”  You ask him, and he croaks something in the affirmative.  You barely hear it.  Genuine your feelings may temporarily be, but you’ve said this script and a hundred like it hundreds of times and you could do it in your sleep. “—I must be on the wrong floor—I’m looking for my kismesis’ hivestem.”

You go through the briefest possible pretense of conversation—he manages to get himself at least part of the way upright, clinging on every word like focusing is a chore—he tells you the hive is upstairs, and you turn sharply around to go, face the cameras for a money shot—

“Wait!”

The tiny part of you that remains an actor is impressed.  There was a really good tone of desperation under that, tight and barely-controlled and wobbly.  You go still and bite your lip, eyes wide and innocent for the camera.  When you turn back, he’s slumped against the wall, reaching after you with one of those thin, long-fingered hands.  His face is open and soft and perfectly vulnerable, there are beads of purple sweat on his temples under his wild hair and on the bridge of his nose, and he looks an inch away from breaking down.

“… _don’t leave me_ ,” he says, pleading, and something about the look in his eyes sends shivers up and down your spine.  He really does look desperate, like he’s on the edge.  “Don’t leave me, it’s so—so fuckin’ dark and I—I can’t—” he trails off, mouthing silently.  When you don’t move to come back to him his shoulders hitch in a stifled, convulsive little noise, almost a sob, and he drops his head into his hands and rocks slowly back and forth, back and forth.  ” _…won’t stop talking,_ " he croaks, more to himself than to you,  _"…they won’t—my fucking_ head—”

When you put a hand on his shoulder, he jumps and gasps so sharp he chokes on it.  He coughs and shudders and stares at you, and close up you can see the fear and the tight-coiled edge of defensive rage in his eyes.  He’s vulnerable now, but you can tell—anyone watching could tell—if you don’t handle this just right, he’s going for you with claws and fangs.

“…okay,” you say, and settle down slowly in front of him, not making any sudden movements.  “Okay, I won’t go anywhere.  What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head mutely, makes a noise that’s half a growl and more a whimper. 

“Voices in your head,” you repeat—not the direction they suggested you take it in the script, but then again nothing about that was mentioned at all anyway.  Nobody said anything about voices in his head, and when you say it out loud back to him, he cringes and one of his thin hands knots in his hair.  A low snarl hums in his chest, almost a purr but with a rumbling, rolling edge to it that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.  “Hey.   _Hey_ , focus on me, okay?  Whatever’s going on in your pan, it’s not real.”

He makes an anguished noise and jerks like he’s trying to shake off a hand that’s touching him.  For a second you’re concerned, and not just as the character—then you catch yourself.  Actor.  He’s an actor, you’re an actor, you’re  _actors._ Goddamn.  You slam that feeling deep down inside you, even while you let it flash across your face in a pang of pure, pale concern. 

“ _Feels—_ FUCKING— _real,_ ” he grits out.

“It’s not.”  You scoot a little bit closer, down on your knees, leaning down to try to get a good look at his face.  “I’m real.   _I’m_ here.  You and me, nobody else.”

“ _You’ll go,_ ” he says into his knees.  “ _—you’ll go and they’ll—_ motherfucking come back—!”

When you reach out and lay a hand on his shoulder, he jumps so hard he almost throws your hand off, and he barely catches himself before he can rake his claws across your face.  His face is gaunt and desperate, his eyes are wide and wild, almost frenzied, and his shoulders heave as he stares at you.  You keep your hand on his shoulder and let him go still again.

“You’re okay,” you tell him, and he jerks, clenches his claws on his legs to keep himself from swiping at you.  Your whole body throbs with pity, and for now it is  _so real_.  “You’re okay now, I’ll take care of you.  L-let me—let me make you feel good.”

In-act you  _know_ , of course, that he’s starved for your touch, that he _needs_  your affection, but in scene or out it still shocks you a little how quickly he goes for you, how he throws himself into your waiting arms and huddles up against you like you’re the only thing that can save him.  It makes something hot and possessive and strange throb in your guts, something fiercer and more passionate than the gentle softness you’ve trained yourself into.  You tamp it down hard.  That’s not what they pay you for.

“ _There you go_ ,” you hum at him, and one of the directors makes a motion you know well at the corner of your vision; you bring a hand up to dig through his tangled hair, find the root of his horn and scratch gently.  He croons and shakes.  He feels so unstable, so genuinely unbalanced, like he’s about to fall and he’s grasping at you to save him—it’s never been this easy to forget you’re acting.  “… _there you go,_ ” you repeat, and he smells like sweat and fear and loneliness, he smells like he hasn’t scrubbed clean in nights and there’s a smear of dirt on his cheek. 

“…’ _s_   _shit in my head,_ ” he gasps to you, slurred from the gentle movements of your fingertips on the skin around his horns, but still clear enough.  Clear enough for you to understand. (For the cameras to pick up— _cameras?  What cameras?_ )  “ _W’n…won’t leave me alone…”_

“You’d feel better if you weren’t huddled up in a dark block,” you tell him, chiding and reluctantly gentle.  “Come the fuck on, man—this place would drive anyone crazy.”  You drag your fingers through his hair again—it’s a mess of knots.  You twist your hand so they’re visible, so the camera picks it up, so everyone can see what a mess he is, before you tease them out and let go of the hair you had wound around your fingers.

“When was the last time you washed your hair?”  You ask him, and he shivers.  You can almost imagine the audience who’ll watch this, a thousand thousand tiny, wanting moans.  “You’re filthy.”  And you lean in, close enough you know the recorders behind him will pick it up, close enough you’re whispering in his ear.  “…if you need me— _I can help…_ ”

“Fuck— _yes, please_  fucking yes—” He keens low and sweet and needy, and presses hard into your hand, even though you’d swear the directors haven’t told him to.  It’s strange how cool the ridges of his horns feel, smooth and cold under your fingertips.  The bases are tangled up in his hair, greasy and dirty.  When was the last time he got his horns cleaned? “Please,  _clean me up, brother, fix me, I wanna feel right again,_ please…”

You haven’t ever been all that into dirty talk, but holy fucking shit.  You let yourself be taken aback—it’s in character, right? –for just a second, and then you’re in charge, guiding him, keeping your hands on his face and his horns.  He follows you blindly as the cameras do, doesn’t bother to open his eyes to see where you’re taking him, and you can’t breathe.  Maybe the lights are too hot.

“Come on,” you tell him; hunched over you, a column of bones and neglect and need.  “… _let’s get you cleaned up_.”

“Cut!”

You stop at the edge of the stage; someone hands you two bottles of water.  You nod at them, take the first one, and try to offer the second one to your current partner.

He doesn’t take it.  You half-turn and see him leaned back against a pile of crates, eyes closed, chewing on his lip and just breathing.  His ears are bright purple.  You thought this guy was a professional, how is he all silent and frozen-up now?  Hasn’t he been on the papped end of more pale smut than any other troll in the galaxy? 

…maybe he just works the same way you do, gets hard into his roles.  You think about how much you lose yourself, how you _genuinely_  let yourself believe the feelings of protectiveness and pity welling up inside you, and imagine that you’re throwing yourself into chaos and fear and lack of control instead, over and over and over.   Being the unstable one every single fucking time has to be kind of hard on you, right?

You’re so used to feeling that pang of pity when you’re in character, it takes you almost a minute of pointless staring before you realize that that’s exactly what you’re feeling now—and not even for his character, for the  _actor._ The fucking actor himself, you know jack-shit about him but you’re aching a little bit inside, thinking about him.

You take a deep breath, slap yourself in the face a few times (mentally, can’t mess up your face in the middle of a shoot) and nudge him a little on the shoulder with a water bottle.  He opens his eyes and looks up at you.  His ears and his skinny neck go a little bit brighter purple than before, which is saying something.

“… _thanks_ ,” he says, really quiet, and takes the water bottle.  His hands are still twitching like he wants to claw something.  You leave him alone.

You sit there in silence together while people shuffle the set around next to you, turning the dark, dingy main block into a lighter and slightly less dingy ablutions block.  Capricorn drinks his water, stares out at the set, and doesn’t say a word to you.  He does mutter to himself, though—he seems to still be jumpy from the scene, and after a performance like that, you have to grudgingly admit you’re not surprised.  That was…intensely real-feeling.  It made your job even easier, like you were hardly acting at all, like you were genuinely pale for each other and he was genuinely distressed.  A shitload better than the amateurs who have to stop in the middle of the scene to read their scripts again and remind themselves of their characters.

And then your break is over, and you’re back on set.  It’s been switched around while you were off—you’re in the ablution block, and you’re holding onto him and you might as well have never left. 

Deep breaths.  ( _Rolling in five.  Four._ ) Leave Karkat Vantas behind. ( _Two, one—_ )

You let your hand slip down his horn to the back of his head—his hair really is terrible ( _what did they do, rub his head in the dirt?_ ) and he still twitches every time your touch on his skin shifts more than a few inches.  When you squeeze a little on the back of his neck, meaning to be comforting, he tenses all over and snarls louder than he has this entire time, and you loosen your grip immediately. 

“You’re okay,” you murmur to him—the golden words, the most important words—and you leave the door open behind you.  “Look, you can leave whenever you want.”  And then, a little daringly, you reach out and pap his cheek gently with the hand not on the back of his head.  He leans into the touch.  You can still hear his hoarse voice in your head, pleading  _fix me,_  and you let that guide you—you have to calm him down before you can start cleaning him up, anyway. 

It’s just as well you don’t have to get right down to it as fast as the flushed and pitch stars do, because it takes you an unusually long time to figure out how to deal with this guy.  Touching and talking to him keep him from attacking you, but actually  _calming him down…_  that’s harder.  You finally figure out something that works when you take his face and turn him to look you in the eyes, force him to see you—“ _Look at me_ ,” you tell him, and when his eyes meet yours some of his shaking fades away. 

So, he needs to be reminded that…what.  That you’re there?  That you’re real?   _Voices in his head_ …

Some part of you spaces out while you calm him down; you’ve done it so many times before, it doesn’t require too much thought.  You like how his face fits into the palm of your hand, though.  He seems to know just how to move to fit the way you’re touching him.  Well, he has to have a lot of experience…shit, you shifted closer without thinking about it, now he’s startled.  Less startled this time, though—he’s getting used to you.  What does the cafeteria have for lunch today?  ( _Why does he have to look so hard into your eyes god why is it so hard to breathe_?)

It can only be a few minutes before he’s settled down enough for you to take your hand away, but your palm and your fingertips are coated in white and grey paint and the design on his face is hopelessly smudged.  Hopeless…yeah, that’s the word.  You sigh and swipe a thumb over his cheekbone, holding it up between the two of you to show off the smear of grey-white on your fingertip. 

“…come on,” you say, “…let’s get this paint off you.  Okay?” You catch sight of a movement out of the corner of your eye, the director sitting up, eyes widening, shaking his head and waving his hands to get your attention—

Capricorn hesitates for a split second, eyes fixed on yours, not breathing, not moving.

Then he nods.

There isn’t a murmur—cameras still rolling and all that shit—but there’s a ripple of movement around the edge of the set that is the silent equivalent.  You barely notice.  You smile at him, and he doesn’t smile back but he doesn’t snarl anymore either.  He’s…docile.  Not soothed, but tamed for the moment.  Under all the layers of personality you’ve poured over yourself, something thrills with excitement—you’ve got this.  He’s genuinely dangerous, and you’ve got him.  You’ve tamed the beast.

His paint is thick and waxy, made to stay, and getting it off actually is a pretty involved process.  Thank god there’s stuff sitting around the bathroom to do the job—you have to scrub a bit, but there are bottles of hide softener and contamination deterrent and you slowly wear away the layer of white and grey that’s hiding his face.  He keeps his eyes on yours the entire time, like he’s looking for something, and you look back at him, not quite sure why but feeling like there’s something happening here, like there’s something…you should be picking up on.

He has a few scars under his paint, you’re surprised to notice.  At least one you vaguely remember him getting in the course of one of his videos.  You’d been impressed by the blood effects.  Looks like they weren’t just effects.

He gets twitchier and jumpier the more paint you get off, but thankfully the sensation of your soft cloth on his skin keeps him from snapping or struggling at all.  But when you’re finally done and you pull the cloth away and reach for the hem of his shirt, he balks and lets out a harsh, full-throated snarl.  You back off immediately, but the harm there is done—he’s jumpy again, hissing between his teeth.

“…you can do it for yourself, right?”  You step back—you’ve got a sense for it, now, when you need to step back and give them some space.  He calms down a little to see you there standing a ways away, there but not touching him.  “It’s okay.  There’s nobody here but us.  Nobody here but you and me, go on…”

He’s clumsy getting undressed, still shaking and flinching to look up at you every time you move, but he gets his clothes off eventually.  When you half-turn to come over to him he winces and huddles in on himself. “…you can get in first if you want,” you tell him, really soft and soothing, that perfect tone of voice you’ve perfected over the sweeps.  “Get the water just right.  I’ll be there in a second.”  It’ll give him something to think about, too…you move a little bit to one side so the camera can come around you and watch you get undressed.  There’s not much you’re shy about anymore, but you make a good show of acting like it, and glance over at the ablution trap while you get ready, thinking, schooling your face into pensive nervousness. 

He’s huddling in the spray when you open the curtain and move in, sitting on the ledge at the other side of the trap, under the water—neither of you pays attention to the camera that hovers over you and moves around you.  When you step in he looks up and presses away from you just a little, wide-eyed and nervous and embarrassed.  For a second, the two of you just stop and look at each other.

Naked, he’s even more pathetically battered than he seemed.  His skin is stretched tight over his bones; You can see the sharp angles of his vestigial cartilaginous wing-struts, every bump of his spinal column.  His arms and hands are bruised, god only knows why, and there are splits in his lips where he’s obviously been chewing on them.  He tilts his head up to you under the water and his face is soft and needy, his hair hangs in his face in soaked sheets, leaving only a single anguished purple eye clear for you to see, his throat is stretched out and bared by his raised chin and his low shoulders, and it makes you want to run your fingertips over it and kiss his worried forehead and stroke his hair out of his eyes.

“ _Turn around for me_ ,” you purr at him, and he groans softly in pure relief and turns his back.  You’re sunk deep in your role and you’re touched breathless; he’d turn his back and bare the nape of his neck to you, when you’d just met, that’s so fucking romantic it’s almost…serendipitous.

No.  No no no no, in-character or not, no, dangerous word.  You can say it for the cameras, but don’t  _ever_  let it into your head, no no no.  You shut that thought down cold behind your warm smile, and reach out to touch the back of his bowed neck. 

He jumps and snarls a little at your touch—a threat show with no threat behind it, an automatic reaction.  He’s scared.  Distantly, you can tell there are cameras around you, watching his face, but you don’t think about it too much.  Reach over his shaking shoulders.  Stroke his face gently.

“ _I’m not going to hurt you,_ ” you tell him.  “You don’t have to be scared.   _Shooosh._ ”

There are five deep scratches on his shoulder—not any kind of makeup or decoration, they’re honestly puffy and bloody and swelled up.  They’re real and fresh and they look painful, almost infected.  He whines low in his chest when the water touches them, and even louder when you have to scrub at them gently and break off the crust of sweat and dirt to get them clean. 

By the time you finish cleaning the cuts on his shoulder, his shoulders are hitching unevenly with every breath.  You don’t even fucking  _believe_ —but he  _is_ , when you lean around and get a good look at his face,  there are streaks of purple tears on his cheeks.  It’s been a long, long time since someone could genuinely cry for you during a shoot, and the last time was almost a sweep ago, with a jade girl you’d shot with at least a dozen times.  You knew her.  You trusted each other.  The  _vulnerability_  of it, of tears of pain when he only just met you, when he  _barely_  knows you, rocks you to your core both in-character and out.  You shoosh and soothe and wipe them away and that just makes his tears come harder, his face crumpling and open without his paint to cover it.  He looks so young, and you’re keenly, painfully aware that you can’t be much older. 

Your insides twist up—your pan reels a little, confused.  How can you pity his genuine vulnerability and the practice it must have taken to learn to pretend to be vulnerable, both together?  How can you pity him for who he’s pretending to be and who he is, both at the same time?  How is he doing this to you, why are you getting drawn into this instead of being the one in control, giving your soothing and letting him receive?

You’re supposed to be running this scene, comfortingly commanding, but the misery and the sheer, shattered, cathartic joy in the way he cries are tugging you inside out until you can’t even remember how the scene was supposed to go.  You don’t fucking care how the scene was supposed to go.  There is no scene.  There’s just your hands and the stains of his facepaint and tears on your fingertips.  You smooth your fingers through his wet hair, and he hiccups and leans his face into your shoulder as you start working some cleaner through the tangles, crooning to him.

Getting his hair clean is a production, in or out of scene.  You have to do a lot of careful working at the knots in his hair, fixing the tangles carefully without tugging at his scalp.  You don’t think he takes well to pain, and he’s still crying—great, jagged sobs, of relief as much as pain, you think.  The last thing you want to do is make him worse when he’s already so broken up.  You do almost as much soothing and petting as you do untangling and cleaning. 

And then you’re done, and you comb his hair out of his face with your fingers and, on a sudden impulse, turn his face up to you to kiss his forehead.  He looks half out of it, cried out and shaky—he leans into your hands and all of a sudden, soft but unmistakable, you hear the sound of a tiny, utterly genuine purr.

Your bloodpusher leaps so hard you actually physically swallow like you have to keep it from jumping out of your mouth.  You’ve had videos where your partner “purred” before—but they dubbed it in later, you just had to imagine hard that it was happening.  You can feel the soft hum of his thorax and the subtle rise and fall of the sound as he breathes.  You couldn’t fake that shit.  The character is so pale he can’t breathe.  Karkat Vantas is suddenly, devastatingly terrified.

“ _Does that feel good?_ ” your voice is hushed without you meaning it to be, your hands…shake a little bit.  Is that you the actor or you the character?  You can’t fucking tell anymore, your breath doesn’t seem to want to come out and your eyes are stinging.  He doesn’t answer, just leans his face into your neck and purrs at you, utterly unguarded, as vulnerable as he can possibly be. 

People are moving around the set, gesturing at each other, trying to argue without making a sound.  You’ve been ignoring them so far, but suddenly you’re annoyed by them.  The fuck do they think they’re doing, scurrying around disturbing people when you finally got him to relax like this?

There are footsteps. Someone walking towards you, and you are so hazy you half-open your eyes and  _snarl_  at them, curling protectively up in front of him.

“Hey,” starts the person who walked into the shot—what’s going on?  Fuck, what’s happening?  But they stop for a second and when they continue their voice is deeper and grittier, it’s got that sharp, scathing hiss that your pan reads, faintly, as pitch.  “—the hell do you think you’re doing, you lowlife?!  I know you think I’m the most loathsome thing in existence, but making my palemate fucking _cheat on me_?  That’s  _low._ ”

 _This isn’t how the scene goes,_  some part of you whispers, but the rest of you is furious and protective, some primal part of you is controlling you now.  Your kismesis, yeah, he’s your kismesis, the one you came here to see and you’re not acting you’re  _living_ , you’re somewhere else where there are no cameras and your asshole pitchmate claims he’s  _pale_  for the shaking troll curled up in your arms, the one you found huddled in a dark room on his own, filthy and lonely, he says they’re  _pale._

“Take better care of your moirail then,” you snarl at him, and your hand is combing through the purple-blood’s hair, gentle and possessive and barely under your conscious control.  “You don’t _fucking deserve him._ ”  ( _What the hell are you doing, Vantas, what the hell is happening, you’re supposed to be sweet and gentle, you’re not supposed to snarl in front of the camera—_ )

“ _I,_ ” the purple-blood starts to sit up, but the further he gets from you the harder he shakes.  The towel slips off his thin shoulder to show a slice of pale silver skin.  He’s still soothed and foggy and weak and so fucking  _vulnerable._   “…no wait, shit, he, he takes care of—”

“Where was he when you needed him?”  You run your fingers over the scratches on his shoulder, the swelling that you had to clean.  He shudders.  You turn up at the asshole who walked in—your pan tells you distantly that you know that face, it’s…one of his agents, it’s someone you—work with, it’s…

Then he makes a move towards the figure in your arms and you’re snarling again.

“I  _was_  pitch for you,” you growl at him, “—but you left him like this and you still say you’re  _pale_ for him?!  You’re  _disgusting,_  you piece of shit, I should tear out your fucking throat!”

And then a hand touches your face.

The purple-blood hunches in front of you, eyes fixed on yours, and his thin, cool fingers stroke the crest of your cheek, the bridge of your nose, he makes a soft, rumbling croon in the depths of his chest and paps you gently.   This.  Isn’t right, you’re…supposed to…you’re the one who always…oh  _god_  it feels so fucking  _right_  though.  The hot fog that was starting to rise in your thinkpan is easing away. 

“… _please_ ,” you whisper, and you don’t know what you’ll do if he goes  back to that—that heinous, fucking—oh— _oh,_ his hands are so cool on your skin—( _this is not in the script, the script is dead and gone, this is something new, what’s happening—)_  “… _don’t.  Not him._ ”

He looks at you for a second—opens his mouth, closes it again and bites his lip.  You can see the jutting ridges of his collarbones, the scrapes on his shoulder are oozing a trickle of purple blood…

He turns back to your pitchmate— _the actor_ –your pitchmate, and his hand stays on your shoulder.

“… _guess it wasn’t as right as we thought, huh_?”  He asks, this lovely, sweet little rasp of a voice, and takes a deep breath.  You squeeze his shoulder—he settles a little, raises his voice a little.  “Gotta ask you to leave, brother.  And not try comin’ back.”

Your kismesis rears back, affronted.  “— _what_ —?!”

“I  _said_ —” and there’s that hint of a snarl again, that low, powerful rolling sound from deep in his thorax, you’ve watched hundreds of his videos and he’s never made a sound like that— “ _Leave us alone._ ”

And he goes.  Backs out, still watching you, and you don’t let go of each other, which is.  Important. That’s.

It.

Fuck.

Fuck what the hell was that,  _fuck._  

You stumble through the rest of the scene, but nobody seems to care that your lines are just a bit less fluid than normal, that your expressions seem just a little bit strained.  You finish up as fast as trollishly possible, and stumble off the stage the second they hand you your money.

About a minute and a half later you’re sitting on the ground, back pressed against a reassuringly cool wall, head on your knees and horns throbbing.  Your digestion sack feels like it’s been shaken hard and hasn’t settled yet, your thoughts won’t hold still long enough for you to string a sentence together and—yeah.  You’ve got greasepaint under your nails.

You’re just wondering how quickly you can possibly get home and into your slime, preferably without talking to  _anyone_ , when you hear footsteps.  They get closer, closer…stop.

“…hey, brother,” says a sleepy, vague-sounding voice.   “Can a motherfucker get his sit on down next to you?”

Oh.

It’s Capricorn. 

For some reason, it’s hard to look him in the eyes.  You do it anyway though, because you’re not a coward, you’re  _not a coward_ and this was just another shoot anyway, what’s so different about this guy? 

He grins at you when you look up at him, all these big, uneven teeth a little bit too big for his mouth.  He has a dumb overbite like yours, but only his longest fangs are big enough to show really well over his lower lip.  He hasn’t bothered to brush out his hair—it’s still a tangled, just-washed mess.  Your fingers itch to brush it out.  You jolt yourself, remind yourself you don’t have a character to stick to. 

The urge doesn’t go away.

“I’m Gamzee,” he says, and shakes his hair out of his eyes.  When he smiles again it’s a little higher on one side than the other, and it makes his cheeks dimple.  He is horribly, disgustingly, unrelentingly cute as fuck.  It’s made worse, so much worse, by how hard it is to see because he  _doesn’t fucking take care of himself_ , and he could be pretty as hell if he would just trim and brush his hair a little bit, polish his horns (it drives you nuts to see people with horns, especially great, long, elegant ones like he’s got, and they  _don’t fucking take care of them_ )…if he would just eat enough to fill out his hollow cheeks and scrawny shoulders.  His face is freshly painted, and this time it’s crisp and neat, meticulously symmetrical and unsmudged.  He’s wearing a pair of huge, baggy drawstring pants and a clean black tanktop with his sign on the front. 

He gets down awkwardly on his skinny knees next to you and holds out a hand to you.  You glare at it for a second, thinking it over, and then take it and give it a single firm shake, holding on no longer than you have to. 

His palms are cool and smooth and soft and when he laid them on your face you went all fuzzy and gentle inside.  You don’t fucking _understand._   You never reacted well to other people papping you before, that’s why you’re always the one taking care of your partner, doing the shooshing and the papping and the cleaning and the reassuring.  When other people papped you it didn’t… _work_.

You realize you’ve been staring at him without answering for much longer than is really smart, especially considering his blood color and how much debauchery you just went through with him—he doesn’t look upset, but with a lot of highbloods it can be impossible to tell. 

“Karkat,” you say, reluctantly, and he brightens up even further and holds out a bottle to you.

“…returning the favor, my main motherfucker,” he explains when you stare at him, and you remember the break between scenes.  You handed him a water-bottle, didn’t you?  Seems like ages ago.  You take the bottle, and try not to feel like you’re sealing a deal. 

Capricorn—Gamzee—shuffles around and then flops back onto his ass so his back thuds against the wall.  He’s even more ludicrous-looking when he’s sitting next to you, a skinny pair of legs in too-baggy pants. 

“Man,” he says, eventually, as you both watch the set get taken down.  “…you know we got another shoot after this one?”

You didn’t, actually.  You wonder if your guys know about it yet, if his are just assuming that yours will be up for it.  Then again, he doesn’t seem to be waiting for an answer.   “…think my arm’s gonna get infected or some shit,” he says vaguely, and he glances at you, almost shy.  “…might not be in any sort of place in my pan to say it next time, so, uh.”  He grins.  “…one hell of a scene.  You got skills all pourin’ out your motherfuckin’ auriculars, bro.”

That takes you aback like a slap in the face.  He grins at you, utterly guileless, like his people haven’t been pushing him to beat you just as hard as yours have been pushing you to beat him.  You’re  _rivals_ , right?  Only sort of not rivals, because you’re on opposite sides of the industry, really, but—

“…you too,” you admit, grudging, and under the fresh layer of paint, his ears go a little bit purple again. 

“Too much kindness all goin’ around here and all,” he mumbles, and bows his head, scratching at the back of his neck.  “…pity I ain’t gonna be much up for to see you do your thing next time.”

“What?”  You honestly have no idea what he’s actually saying half of the time, but it sounds like he’s…not going to be there?  How the fuck are you supposed to do a sick shoot with the sick party out of the fucking picture, exactly?  “What are you talking about?”

He looks surprised.

“Gonna be getting all that wicked ill in me, right?  Can’t do much watching like that.” he pulls up his sleeve and looks at his shoulder, the cuts you cleaned out.  Chews on his lip and pokes at them.  “…you cleaned me up too good, brother, gonna have to get some shit to put on this, get it going again and nasty it up for you.”

You find, all of a sudden, that your traitorous aeration sponges do not want to work.

“You.  You’re  _actually_  going to get them infected?  On  _purpose_?”

He blinks at you.  “…yeah…?”  He says, like he’s not sure what you’re asking, and all of a sudden you remember the scars you saw on him as you cleaned him up, the other videos you’ve grudgingly watched where people cleaned his wounds and nursed him when he was sick.

…you  _thought_  those special effects looked suspiciously, unfairly good. 

“…oh,” you say, because what the fuck else is there to say.  “…okay.”

“Makara!”

He looks up.  Hauls himself to his feet.

“We gotta go,” he says, and there’s something about his voice, he sounds almost…disappointed?  “Gotta rest my bad self up for tomorrow, see who I’m working with then.  I’ll get a look on for you next time I’m around, bro.”

“Yeah,” you say, but he’s already gone, strolling off towards his manager with those long, skinny legs.  The guy who welcomes him is the one who came onto the set unexpectedly—your ‘kismesis’.  Gamzee smiles at him, but it doesn’t look quite the same as it did when he smiled at you.

You’re just trying to pick out what exactly is different about it, when someone grabs you by the shoulder and pulls you around and your whole team is staring back at you, eyes wide and grins wider. 

“…what,” you say.

“Oh my god, Vantas,” says the director, “I thought we were gonna lose you today, you got serious globes.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”  You ask, and they all look at each other like  _can you believe this kid_? 

“The  _paint_ ,” says your agent tremulously.  “His paint!  I can’t believe you asked him to take it off and he just— _did_!”

Something clenches up in the pit of your stomach.  “He—that wasn’t—he wasn’t supposed to take off his paint?”

“You’ve watched his videos, right?”

You hunch a little.  “…some.”  You’re supposed to watch all of them, keep up on him.  You haven’t exactly been keeping up on your homework.  And you haven’t watched most of the shower ones, either.  You don’t really like seeing other trolls naked, you don’t do it much outside of work.

“Capricorn  _never_  takes off his facepaint,” says someone else, kind of hushed, almost awed.  “And he just—said yes!  Just like that!  Last time someone asked him to do that, he put their head through a wall!”

You try to imagine the mild, sweet troll you just cleaned and shooshed and soothed putting someone’s head through a wall.  A jolt of breathless, tight… _something_  runs through you, like arousal but higher in your thorax and squeezing your aeration sponges.  Almost fear.  So he does have his highblood rages after all?  Not just the edgy, snarling threat shows you helped him through, but real rages, violent swings?  They never show those on film, he’s always soft and vulnerable or, or maybe snarling and tense at worst, never  _dangerous_ —

“Vantas?”

You shake yourself awake and then immediately hate yourself.

“I don’t know why he let me, okay?”  You really don’t, either—you can tell some of them don’t believe you.  Which is stupid, what would the point be of not letting your team know that you’d arranged that with him beforehand?  He let you take off his paint…huh. “He said we were going to have another shoot together, when’s that?”

They look surprised by that, too.  Someone in the back flips through a clipboard and hands it up to the director.

“…a week and a half,” he reports.   “You don’t have another shoot till tomorrow night, though—if you want to head out for a couple of hours…?”

You’re honestly surprised.  Usually they don’t want you going out in public—somebody might notice you, recognize you—god forbid, somebody might kill you and then they would be out a  _lot_  of money.  They must be  _really_  happy with what they got today.

“Okay,” you say finally, suspicious and not bothering to hide it.  “…okay, yeah, sure.”

—

There are people tailing you, of course.  You can see them as you head down the street in your nondescript jacket and the stupid hat they make you wear with the fake horns so nobody recognizes your little nubs.  (You’re pretty sure these are actually real horns, but they’re fake by way of not being yours.  You hate wearing them, but hell, it’s part of your contract, and it does keep people from recognizing you.)  You buy yourself some really nice steak to cook up for dinner, a big jug of milk and—hell, why not—a bag of sugar-grubs, because you just did some seriously fucking quality work and you know it.

Then you go home, snuggle into the big pile of cushions next to your ‘coon, and boot up your husktop.

The video is just up, only 100 views but already the comments are gold.  There’s one or two hate messages, or people tearing one or both of you down on looks, acting ability, or unspecified reasons that they just don’t fucking like you, but overall everyone is as thrilled as ever.

There seems to be…one theme, running throughout.

_never seen Cancer get papped b4, l%k a+ +he l%k on his face! goddamn +ha+ shi+ = quali+y._

_oh my god that protective Look on Capricorn’s facial Expression @ 8:50  i’m going to fucking die to Death that’s hot as Hell is Hot. has he ever done That before?_

_Never seen th^t before_

_is it me~ or is this one different~??? like different from their other videos~~~~?!_

And of course, scattered throughout, “ _LOL chutefuckers”, “this shit is all so faked goddamn”, “AVOID THE CULLIG DRONES WITH THIS FULLPROOF METHOD REVIEW RATE AND SUBSCIBE TO FIND OUT”, “that’s not how it works with me and_ my  _moirail”, ““NOW they should FUCK >87” _and various suggestions for other perversities you should add in the next video.  But every few comments, there it is, again and again.  “never seen that before”.  “That’s different”. 

The industry is looking for what it already has, but can’t ever get enough of—that’s what your team keeps on telling you.  Contact.  Intimacy.  A clear power dynamic that they can put themselves on one end of.  One of you soothing and the other one unstable. 

But when you got angry, minutes after you’d calmed him down, he turned around and he papped  _you_.

You watch the video even, even though you’ve promised yourself you’ll never ever watch your own videos.  Your face when the hastily-conscripted kismesis comes towards you is…unfamiliar, even to yourself.  You see yourself angry, sure, every time you look in the mirror, but never like that.  You’d bared more teeth than you even knew you had, your eyes looked dazzlingly, overwhelmingly scarlet.  And when he reaches up and touches your face—

You have to stop the video.  You’re not  _embarrassed_ , come on, you’re a professional, you just…don’t…you can’t—

You close the video as the views tick slowly up towards 500,000, and head off for actual ablutions that don’t involve a camera hovering in your face.

—

The next week and a half passes quickly.  You have a lot of shoots—they’re even more boring and incredibly annoying, after the smooth way you and…Gamzee…managed together.  People stopping, checking notes, fumbling pre-decided lines, breaking up the mood, trying to sneak in ‘rails with pails subtext that in some cases is so grossly blatant you flatly cancel the shoot and refuse to continue.  You receive a letter full of fish puns and headed with the crest of her imperious condescension herself, bluntly letting you know that that shit was hot as fuck and you should kelp up the good work—you bury your face in your pillow and make undignified noises for a few minutes before you pin that up on your wall with the few pieces of fanmail you see fit to keep.

And then you’re wandering onto set, flicking through the profile you picked up a bit more than a week ago, looking at a familiar backstory.  You’ve been wanting to ask Gamzee ever since last shoot about his acting methods, because what the fuck, why not—but he’s not there when you get there.  He arrives five minutes before they’re supposed to start shooting, and you turn as you hear the noise level rise—

and then stop dead in your tracks.

The black tanktop is back, the baggy pants—but the shoulder you cleaned last time is wrapped up in bandages that look old and filthy and are spotted with old purple blood.  There are two other trolls supporting him; he’s swaying where he stands, eyes half-shut, shoulders rising and falling with an effort that’s obvious from all the way across the room.

You don’t realize you’re running until you’re elbowing one of your team out of the way, hurrying up to the group of agents and handlers gathered around Gamzee.  Your lead director is talking to his—you catch the words,  _‘—further than intended—’_ and  _‘purple, he’s tough enough to live through almost anything,_ ’ and then, quieter, a nasty sort of laugh,  _‘…we’ve done worse, he’ll put up with whatever we—_ ’

“What the fuck is this?”  You demand, and everyone turns to look at you.  Gamzee twitches, but doesn’t raise his head.  There’s a horrible smell in the air around him—infection.  Sickness.  Your eyes fall on the old, dirty bandages again, and the spots of blood seeping through them.  “The hell is this supposed to be?”

“For the shoot,” says his handler casually.  “…it was just meant to be his shoulder, but the big idiot got sick on top of that and we thought it seemed like bad business sense to—”

“To take him to a fucking  _hospital_?”  Your pusher is thundering in your mouth, your skin prickles with sudden, unreasoning anger.  “He’s sick!  He’s  _really fucking sick!_ ”

“So take care of him, hotshot,” says his agent coolly.  “That’s what we’re paying for.  Do your job.”

You open your mouth to yell—and then stop, because your director has a hand on your shoulder, pulling you away.  People around you are bustling around.  Someone yells  _shoot in five_! and you watch Gamzee stagger slowly over to the mess you ‘found’ him in during the last scene—he almost collapses on it.  Curls up, shivering and small and you can’t help it, no matter how much you want to argue about this right now your feet are taking you through the door towards him, your hands are on his shaking shoulders.

The shoot takes almost the entire day.  It’s exhausting, involves a lot more running around and lifting things (like Gamzee’s scrawny, limp body) and it’s full of a lot more gross body stuff than you’re used to by far.  Technically, the plot is an old favorite, almost a tradition; a fix-up sequence you could do in your sleep. 

That is, when your partner is  _acting_.  At times during the shoot, you are convinced that Gamzee is  _actually dying_  right there in front of you; hacking cough, feverish skin and terrible bouts of dry retching that don’t bring anything up but make his eyes water and his nose run and leave him hacking and shaking on the ground.  It’s terrible, when he starts coughing—writhing like a worm on a hook, like he can get to air if he just fights hard enough, clutching his chest so hard his claws dig into his own skin, and you have to lean over him and press him down against the ground with the full weight of your body to keep him from thrashing too hard and hurting himself. 

His shoulder, when you get the bandages off, is just as terrible. The skin is taut and shiny and sickly purple-black and there are substances you don’t want to put names to soaking into the makeshift bandages.  When you clean it he struggles even harder than he did when you cleaned out the original cuts, and the noises he makes are terribly young and confused and helpless and it takes everything you have not to get up, storm over to somebody important and punch them in the guts until they agree to take him to a hospital.

But you don’t, because you need your job, because he needs his job, because you’re sunk too deep into the character, because you _don’t want to leave him_.  You just hang onto him and pat his back to clear out the shit inside his lungs, give him water and put soaked rags on his face until his fever breaks. 

It takes hours.  But when his eyes finally open and  _focus on you_ , whether it’s the pure relief on his face at seeing you’re there or the soft, half-heard sigh of relief from everyone around you or just the way his hand slides down to touch yours, the aching in your shoulders and the tension headache pounding behind your oculars like white-hot nails are suddenly all worth it.

After that, of course, there’s a bit of cleanup, a couple of scenes of sweet pale nothings, you worrying over him a lot (hardly acted, goddamn) just to give the impression that he’s on the road to recovery, but that bit is always kept to a minimum.  The palemate shows up and through their diligence, the sick troll is healed and taken care of.  Boom, everything is all better. 

They don’t feel the need to show the fact that as soon as the cameras are shut down, Gamzee collapses, coughing again.  You manages to catch his bony shoulders before his head can thump against the ground, and he’s just conscious enough to give you a strained, split-second smile before his breath catches and turns into coughs again. 

“Vantas,” says someone over your shoulder, and you flinch and hunch over him.  A growl starts up deeper in your thorax than you’ve ever felt, with this chittering  _get the fuck away from us_  edge over the top of it you don’t even consciously know how to make, _holy shit get a hold of yourself Vantas the scene is_  OH NO YOU FUCKING DON’T, GET AWAY FROM HIM _._

You keep yourself from snapping your fangs at the hand on your shoulder, but only barely.  The sudden spike in your growl is harder to hold back, though, and the hand pulls away abruptly.

“What the hell?”  People are milling around, mumbling in confusion and anger and distress.  “ _What’s wrong with him?_ ”

It takes a long couple of seconds for you to get yourself back under control.  But that  _protectiveness_ —it doesn’t go away.  You keep reminding yourself  _there’s no cameras there’s no character the scene is over_  but you can’t quite force yourself to let go of him or completely cut the growl that’s still rumbling out of you.

“Sorry,” you manage to say, through the growl, “—I—don’t—” and then they make another move to get close to you and you snap _“GET BACK_!”  Your hands are numb, but when you look at them you see they’re shaking and you didn’t notice.  Your squawk blister is full of acid, you can taste it like old metal in the back of your mouth.  Sweat on the back of your neck.  Pressure inside your thinkpan.  “Don’t you fucking  _dare_!”

And then Gamzee groans and shifts.  A cold hand pats your arm. “… _ease up_ ,” he mumbles, and lays a shaky hand over yours.  “… _can’t hardly—fucking breathe, bro._ ”

You hadn’t realized you were squeezing him tighter and tighter, but he’s pressed so hard against you so hard you can feel him struggling to draw a full breath. 

You let go and stand up so fast he actually does thump his head on the floor this time, backing away.  You don’t know what to do with your hands.  Shove them in your pockets.

“I,” you say.  “I’m.  I need a drink.”

“Oh,” says Gamzee dazedly from the ground, and grins at you as you back away.  “Hey bro you should get two and I’m just gonna lie here and make peaceful aerations real quick.”

“Yeah,” you say, and then you turn and you run the fuck away.

—

By the time you’ve calmed yourself down and gotten two bottles of some kind of shitty flavored water from a trembling little starstruck seven-sweep-old, they’ve moved Gamzee over to the wall, out of sight of the rest of the crew members where he can cough in peace.  He’s got a mirror propped up on his knees; he’s doing up his facepaint again with painstaking care.  He glances up when you come over, grins (goddamn he still looks like he’s about to pass out) and pats the ground next to him.

You sit there in silence while he paints his face.  It’s almost hypnotic to watch; the smooth way the brush slides over his face, blotting out the smears and the patches where you can see grey skin underneath.  His hands shake ever-so-slightly, but he keeps them steady, watching himself in the mirror with more concentration than you’ve ever seen on his face before. 

You feel like you’re…watching something special.  Like when you took his paint off, but less intimate.  Bigger.  It’s kind of unnerving. 

He stows the little pots of paint away in a big pocket once he’s done, leans back against the wall and sighs.

“… _hell of a night_ ,” he says, and his voice sounds as haggard as he looks, bruised and raggedly hoarse.

“Yeah, no shit.”  You hand him his bottle: he hums a sort of grateful noise—winces and presses a hand to his throat.  “…never seen someone do what you just did, god.”

His eyebrows quirk together—his paint crinkles a little, you notice vaguely.  “…what,” he says eventually, and you roll your eyes at the painfully slow reaction.   _Sopor addiction_ , you remember.  And he’s still sick as a barkbeast. No wonder it was so delayed. “What?”

“…it’s pretty hardcore of you, that’s all I’m saying,” you say, and take a drink.  “Doing the injuries and sickness and shit like that, I mean.”

“Yeah?”  His voice still sounds scoured raw, but at least now he’s conscious and not actively working on dying anymore. 

“Most people just, y’know…pretend.”

You see his face crinkle up in confusion under his fucked-up paint.  “…what?”

“Y’know…” you make a sort of vague gesture, because you’re not really all that sure you know how ‘normal’ people do it, actually. “…act.  Pretend.  Get a scratch and paint it up in their color and put some fake ooze on it.”

“…but then what the fuck are you supposed to get on your heal of?”  He demands, confused, and you begin to realize that the concept of  _acting_  might not even be in this guy’s (stunted) vocabulary.  “If I’m not sick, what’s to fix?”

“If you’re just pretending to be sick, I just pretend to make you better,” you explain, and he stares at you like you’re gibbering nonsense.  “—look, this is just how it fucking  _works_ , alright, stop looking at me like that.”

“Both pretending?”  He says, and you nod.  He swallows hard, painfully.  Shit.  Ohhh, shit, no, shit, there’s acting and then there’s _acting_  and you assumed he was doing at least one of those but—

“…you didn’t know they were acting,” you say, dull with horror.  “God _damn_.  Listen, man—”

 “… _I was motherfuckin’ pale for them_ ,” he says, really quietly, and your bloodpusher drops right out of you.  Whatever you were about to say dies an inelegant death in your throat and comes out a sort of strangled sigh.  “I—I wanted—I—fuck.”  And then he looks up at you and his face falls even further.  “…so,” he says.  “…so you didn’t—you weren’t ever—”

His face crumples.  Its instinct, after two long shoots, you reach out before you can stop yourself and put a hand over his mouth before he can open it again.  He makes a startled noise behind your fingers and stares at you, wide-eyed.

“I,” you say, and then you stall, hard, not sure what to say, and your mouth keeps going without you.  “Okay listen, douchefuck, don’t start doing this now—you’re not healthy enough, you’re gonna kill yourself or something.”

Wow Vantas, that is the  _best_  possible reaction when he’s having a pale crisis.  Uh, what can you possible even say to make this better, fuck. 

“It’s not fake when I do it,” you say, and he stares at you, confused and shocked and still kind of upset and honestly a little bit pissed, oops—“—I don’t  _pretend_  to be pale for people when I shoosh them, okay, I  _am_  pale for them, I—I get into it so hard, sometimes, I—I forget—what I was before I started pretending.  Alright?”  Suddenly it’s really hard to look him in the eyes.  You drop your eyes down to his bandaged shoulder and avoid his face.  “…it was too fucking easy, though,” you say, and hate how tiny and cheesy and stupid your voice sounds.  “…when I was pale for you.”

He stares at you, mouth hanging open.  You are digging yourself a hole.  Uh.  Fuck, what are you even trying to say here, uh…

“…I mean, you’re really good,” you say, and then feel like an idiot.  “—I mean not that you were acting, okay I know, you, you just said that, I just—fuck, wow, listen to me blabbering, way to go Vantas just shove shit in everybody’s auricular clots until their pans explode like a bullfairy getting fucked by a musclebea—”

“Wait,” says Gamzee slowly, and you grind to a halt, staring at him apprehensively.  He’s squinting somewhere into the middle-distance with an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.  “…so…” and then he looks down at you and your eyes meet and your face goes completely red right up to the tips of your ears.  He looks.  Hopeful.  Well no that’s not the worst part, the worst part is that he looks so  _gentle,_ so…pitying.  Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuck, no, this sort of shit doesn’t happen to you  _no._

“…uh,” you say, like a real motherfucking winner.  “…are you free after this shoot?”

He grins so wide at you, his facepaint is barely an exaggeration.  He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out—he just throws himself forward instead, catches you around the ribs (you yelp and jump as he touches your sides, but he doesn’t seem to notice) and pulls you up against him in a bone-crushing hug.

It’s surprisingly nice, when you get used to the idea.  You’re lifted part of the way off the ground he’s holding on so tight, and it’s a little bit hard to breathe with him squeezing so hard.  He smells like sweat, but his skin is comfortably cool against yours after the hot stage lights.  His breathing is a tight, raspy sound next to your ear, but you can hear the faint hum of a happy purr under it.  This is…nice.  It’s nice.

There’s a moment—just before you finally relax into it—where it looks like both of you are going to move away, it’s just going to be, well, a hug.  A really awkward hug.  But then he  _doesn’t_  pull away, and the two of you kind of slide down a little bit until you’re almost lying down against the sacks behind the set and he doesn’t let go and this is kind of cuddling, isn’t it.  Oh god, okay, this is happening.  This isn’t porn this time, this is  _happening_.

You start to try to do what you’ve always done in your videos—the soothing, the touching—but he’s calm already, he doesn’t need to be calmed down (so…so what are you supposed to…?).  He just takes your hands and shakes his head gently.  When you drop your hands, confused, he pulls you closer and curls up all around you like a big, cool blanket.  As you lie there, strangely out of your depth, he shifts around and puts his face in your hair.

You’re vaguely aware that he must be getting paint on you, but next second he starts running his fingers through your hair and rubbing the nape of your neck and you completely forget to care.  Fucking  _hell_  that feels amazing.  Why did nobody ever tell you how great it felt to have someone do this for you?  You’ve done it almost every day of your life for sweeps and sweeps and never understood why it melts people under your hands—

Like it’s doing to you, and for a second you tense up, worrying all over again because you should…not be letting him do this for you, you barely…know him, ahhh but god it’s so  _great…_

You’ve been worrying about him and bending over him to clean up his shoulder and bowing over his shaking body for hours, and now your entire back is a mass of knots.  He works his fingers into your muscles hard enough it  _almost_  hurts and you catch yourself making these stupid little noises, noises you wouldn’t be caught dead making in a normal shoot; little gasps, whines, chirping clicks.  He doesn’t seem to get tired of touching you, even though you’re not touching him back—he just works patiently at your back until you’re sprawled and limp and so fucking  _relaxed_  you hardly remember your own name.

“Vantas,” somebody says sharply, and they don’t sound pleased.  “…what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

You’re too far away and dizzy and warm to process that, let alone answer it, so you don’t.  Somewhere far off, someone growls.

“Fuck off,” says a voice that’s almost familiar.  “He’s restin’.”

“Hush, Makara,” says another voice harshly.  “We have somewhere to be, get up.”

“ _Don’t you fucking_ hush _me_!”

The murmuring around you goes silent.  You’re.  Bundled up against someone’s chest, you’re…you can feel yourself purring, actually _purring_ , your muscles feel like warm clay.  You want the yelling to stop.  You’re always yelling, yelling fucking sucks, it makes your throat hurt and your head hurt but you’re just so angry all the time and all of a sudden you aren’t.  You don’t have to be angry.  You want it to last, and they keep  _yelling_. 

“…alright,” says the voice, more careful this time.  “Uh…I’m…sorry—”

“Fucking should be,” mumbles the voice close to your ear, and you’re squeezed close.  “Now fuck off.”

—

You date after that, if you can really call it dating.  You quickly learn that Gamzee has no sense of romance whatsoever, and is endearingly  _awful_  at knowing when to shut up.  He’s a terrible liar, but a great storyteller once he gets into the swing of things.  He falls asleep at bizarre hours of the day and night and wakes up fast and hard and vicious.  He has actually a  _ton_  of friends, even though all of them seem to sort of hate him—but they keep talking to him.  You find out that he can sing and he has a nice voice, but he couldn’t hold a tune if his life depended on it.

You don’t know what he finds out about you.  All you know is that he doesn’t leave.

You don’t ever want him to.

And thus comes the problem.

You think about it for a long, long time before you get around to telling anybody—and of course the first person you talk to about it ends up being Gamzee, because he’s starting to get a sense for when you’re worrying and need to be talked down out of a terrifying spiral of  _what-if_ s.  You don’t think he really understands what’s bothering you so much—the job was never quite the same for him as it was for you—but he just smiles and tells you  _whatever you want, best friend, I’m chill with it._  

And then all the worry from a week and a half of agonizing lands on your head like a ton of bricks and you kind of cry like the main character of a soap opera who just lost all four quadrants in a night.  But nobody needs to know about that.  You’re cool, you’re tough, you’re famous, you’re…

…quitting your job.

You’re on a sweep-by-sweep contract, is the thing—and you haven’t renewed it yet for the new sweep and you  _can’t_ , you can’t just go out and pretend to be the other half of someone when you have a real moirail, an  _actual palemate_  always at the back of your pan.  You can’t do it.  And you can’t broadcast that shit to the galaxy either, even if the internet would be willing to see you and him with only each other for the rest of your careers.  Those first two videos—well, they’re alright.  It’s not like you knew, then.  You were acting, mostly.  You can let that pass, you can ignore it.  But making new videos, now that you know—now you’re…

You can’t.

Of course they don’t take it well, when you tell them all this.  Not very well at-fucking-all.  They offer you more money, and you tell them what the truth is, which is that you just basically can’t do what they’re asking you to do at all.  It would feel like…blasphemy or something.  Your director, who’s never had much patience for you or your “ _unconventional_ ” methods, gets pretty pissed off and starts screaming at you about how you’re a useless fucking romantic and you’ll never fucking work in this industry again.  You scream back at him about romance and quadrants and what a useless fucker he was behind the camera and long story short you get forcefully ejected from the building.

You go to look at Gamzee’s contract while you’re out, and you’re really not surprised at all how much absolutely illegal shit they’ve crammed in there.  You call a friend, who advances on Gamzee’s team with a briefcase full of paperwork, a drawn sword, and a smile like a snap-beast about to come out of the watering hole and drag down some helpless prey.  Gamzee’s contract is quietly, painfully cancelled.

The internet backlash is massive.  You move—and you take Gamzee with you, because those shitwads who contracted him in the first place were just keeping him with them in the shittiest part of the studio.  No wonder he was so skinny and dirty and fucked-up-looking even though his videos were making so much revenue; the room was basically a cellar.  Terezi digs a few thousand caegar out of his handlers through undisclosed methods that you aren’t allowed to see or hear, because  _TH4T’S JUST1C3_.  Drops a quick little smack of a kiss on your lips, backhands you casually in the face, and then strolls off cackling while you’re holding your face and swearing.

You yell “ _FUCKING THANK YOU, YOU DRIED-UP BITCH!_ ” after her, and by the time she turns the corner she’s laughing so hard she can’t walk straight.

You buy yourself a little two-coon apartment with an internet connection and a not-too-shitty view, and start looking for jobs.

It’s one morning, almost midday, and you’ve just come home from a long talk with a store owner that turned into a screaming match over…you don’t even remember, something banal…when the telecommunication relay device starts ringing.

You pick it up and stare at it.   _Phone_ , you recall vaguely.  Stupid word.  Stupid aristocrats.  You had to talk like a blueblood once for some kind of shitty period-drama fuckery.  The words stick in your head somehow.   _Phone._   Stupid fucking word.

You put the “phone” up to one ear, close your eyes, and sigh so heavily you hope the person on the other end will just hang the fuck up without ever having to be told to.

“…I’m not renewing my contract,” you tell them.

“ _Hey_ ,” says the voice over the phone.  You’re surprised to find that don’t know the sound; you frown at the caller ID, and then frown harder when you read what it says:  _don’t you fucking dare hang up._   What the hell.  “ _This Vantas_?”

“Uh…sure.” 

“ _Heard you quit making videos.”_

Oh  _god_ , it’s a pissed-off fan.  How the hell and more importantly, are you still safe?  Because you are not above sleeping in front of the door with your sickles out if some of your psycho fans are going to start showing up.

“How the hell did you get this number?”

“ _I got_ all _the numbers, li’l nubs._ ”

“Hey,  _fuck_  y—” you start, and then your pan kind of…nudges you.  You stop dead in the middle of your rant, thinking. 

_That shit hot as hell, nubs.  Kelp up the good work…_

“…holy shit,” you say.  “No fucking way.”

The voice on the other end of the line just laughs.

“ _You a shark kid, Vantas_. _You know I had a little basshole hang up on me once?  I told him not to and everyfin._ ”

“…what an idiot,” you say, dry-mouthed and jittery with disbelief.  This can’t be real, right?  It’s a dream.  “How can I, uh.  How can I…surf…the empire?”

The laughter is so loud and sudden you have to hold the phone away from your ear.  By the time it dies away, the empress is just giggling—you catch the words “—ahhhh,  _I love you, li’l nubs!_ ” and your pusher does a treasonous and stupid fluttery little double-beat in your thorax. 

“ _No, but reelly,_ ” she says finally, and you can still hear her laughing a little, a brush of static that might be her wiping her eyes.  You feel ten stories tall.  “ _Here to talk at you aboat those videos.”_

Oh.

“…it…” you start, confidence draining away with every word, “…we didn’t…we didn’t mean to disrespect—”

“ _Nubs,_ ” she says sternly, and you shut up instantly.  “… _nubs.  Li’l nubbsy Vantas.  If you don’t wanna sand pics of you and your morayeel pilin’ it up all over the empire, that’s your lookout, right.  You figure you got enough money or whatever, getting’ ray-t outta the biz, s’chool with me, whatever.  I got bigger fish to fry.  But I got…an offer._ ”

You have to swallow hard—and then again—before you can talk.  Gamzee wanders in from the other room and gives you a look; you raise your eyebrows and widen your eyes at him and then shake your head urgently when he starts to walk over. 

“…what kind of offer?”

“ _You know how much treasurf I got, kid?_ ”

“…all of it…in the empire?”

She laughs again.  “Bingo!   _Know what I got to spend it on?_ ”

“…uh…well, I…I would…whatever you want?”

“ _Too clam right!”_  she laughs at herself—or at you, at something, she just laughs to herself for a few second, and then all of a sudden her voice is deadly serious again, only the merest tremble of a smile underneath it.  “… _how much those bottom-feeders at your last job pay you?_ ”

“150 caegar per shoot,” you say, almost automatically.  “Extra per thousand views.  What—?”

“ _Chump change,_ ” she scoffs, and you imagine her, lounging in her throne, deadly and gorgeous and inspecting her perfect, fuschia claws.  “… _how’d you like to get a hundred times that_?”

You can’t answer for a few minutes because you’re too busy trying not to fall down and die.  Finally you manage, almost even, “…I don’t think…I know what you’re saying here.”

A sigh.  “ _Let me make this shrimple for you,_ ” she says.  “ _And you pick whichwaver sounds more inshelligent to you, buoy.  Option one, you go finned some other job and get along with whatever money they give you.  Or two…_ ” and you can hear her  _grin._   “… _you be exclusive to me.  Videos don’t go to no other troll in the galaxsea.  And I make you rich as a motherglubber.”_

Gamzee didn’t care, you remember dizzily, distantly.  Gamzee wouldn’t mind at all.  You can do what you want.  You can do _whatever you want._

“…your Condescension,” you say, as evenly as you can, and try to keep the huge grin out of your voice.  “…it would be my genuine coddamn pleasure."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rampant-noodle asked splickedylit:
> 
> Random possible ficlet request idea: it would be so funny/cool to get to read the events after diamonds and stars. Maybe some of Condy watching her imperially sanctioned personal gamkar pale smut. I just have this great image in my head of her getting so into it and junk I think it would be hilarious!!!

You set up the camera and you almost overbalance it twice before Gamzee comes up behind you and wraps his big, cold hands over yours, helping you steady it.  Your hands are shaking.  You never had anxiety before scenes before, god, it’s just you and Gamzee and a little, shitty camera, and this is going to the  _empress,_ _god_ —

“ _Good thing we’re all about to get our pale on_ ,” Gamzee murmurs in your ear, and when his hand shifts you see the light on—the first thing on the recording will be your frightened face, Gamzee’s long arms framing you.  ” _You’re all outta your chill, brother._ ”

"…yeah," you force yourself to say, and start to turn around—Gamzee doesn’t let you.  Just holds you there with your back to him.  He buries his face in your hair; his arm wraps up around you and cups your cheek—you didn’t realize that your face was burning, but his fingers are so cold.  " _Hh—_ yeah, okay.”  You have to work not to turn to the camera and apologize to the Condesce for what a disappointing display this has to be—you’ll have to edit this out.  Yeah, you’ll…you..

And then you forget about the camera because Gamzee gets his hands on your horns and all of a sudden you’re a limp, shivering mess.  You’ve done this so many times to other people, but your horns are  _tiny_  and stunted and sensitive and it feels like somebody is replacing your bones with hot wax.

"I—oh," you manage to get out, " _Oh_  fuck…”

“ _Yeah,_ " he murmurs to you, and he helps you back and back until he pulls you down on the pile with him, half in his lap.  You distantly hear a soft whir as the camera moves and follows you, focusing on the two of you on the pile together.  He curls up around you—possessive and gentle and his hands are so soft and cool… " _Yeah brother, I got you, talk to me…”_

You try, really you do, but all that comes out when you open your mouth is a soft, hoarse whimpering sound.  Gamzee purrs and doesn’t ease up—wraps both his hands around both of your horns and rubs hard and slow until you’re making helpless noises at the warm shudders going through you, the sweet surrender.  

“ _Yeah,”_ he says again, and there’s a touch of wickedness to his voice now, a hint of something you’re not quite used to hearing from him and when you get one eye open he’s watching your face, he’s smiling absently like a man watching a wonderful show.  ” _Yeah, can’t even get it out, right?  Fuck, brother, but you’re pretty like this._ "  And he leans down and kisses your forehead, nuzzles into your hair.  " _Forget about it,_ " he says, really quiet.  " _Don’t worry for a bit, best friend.  Don’t you even get to motherfuckin’ worrying._ ”

You barely remember the rest of that first video—maybe Gamzee knows that you’re going to worry if he lets you surface, because he keeps you just barely below that fuzzy threshold where you have the pan-power to moderate what comes out of your squawk-blister.  

You blurt out all sorts of shit, you know that—things you’ve told him before, sometimes, about how you forget sometimes whether you’re pale or pretending, whether you’re genuine or acting.  Things you haven’t told him, how you’re scared you won’t ever be able to go out again in case somebody recognizes you and someone attacks you for not being their perfect pale fantasy anymore.

He gets you to sleep there, eventually, coaxes you off until you’re dozing in hot, fuzzy pleasure.

By the time you come back out of it, Gamzee has left and come back—he brought a blanket, which he drapes over the two of you.  He sinks your heat into his cool skin and keeps it from getting too hot under the blanket; you have it on his word that your body heat makes it wonderfully warm for him when he cuddles with you.  

"… _I…have to edit that video,_ " you say dreamily, and nuzzle into his neck.  You should be embarrassed, but you can’t find the spot in your pan where that goes and honestly right this second you don’t miss it. 

"Bit late now," he mumbles back, and yawns into your hair, snuggling down against you. "… _already sent it._ ”

You don’t talk to him for an entire night.

The reason you finally start talking to him again—no, not because he keeps making big sad eyes at you and edging closer to you making apologizing noises, okay, that has… _nothing_  to do with it—is that you get a video message.

You get a video message from her Imperious Condescension.  You see her wave at you and blow you a kiss with long, dark, gold-glinting fingers, the flash of her fuschia nails.  See her settle back in and the way she focuses in on your video in front of her—oh god there’s a picture of your video in the corner of the screen so you can tell what part she’s watching and everything  _fuck—_ Gamzee pets your hair anxiously, and you’re so tense you completely forget to shake him off.  

The entire thing is like an amazing, horrendously embarrassing dream.  You sit and watch her return message with your mouth hanging open, trying to  _focus_.  That’s the  _empress_  and she has one of her hands lingering on her own regal cheekbone, her eyes half shut and her painted mouth curled almost into a smile as she watches you get shooshed silly by your moirail.  As she watches you get reduced to a quivering pile of purring mess by his hands on your horns and her tongue flicks out over her delicately-painted lips and her fingertips run over her own regal fins and she shivers.  As she listens to you pour your heart out to him and cups her face in her hands and chews on her lip and smiles like she’s watching perfect scripted romance, not your stammering, tearful confessions.

At the end she turns to the camera and looks straight at you, and even though you know it’s a recording and there is no way she can see you, you feel your face go red.  

“ _Fuck_ yes _, bay-b,_ " she says, and she clicks her fingers in the air.  Instantly, a window pops up on your screen; FUNDS TRANSFER, it says, and then a number that makes you choke on your own tongue.  How the fuck did she coordinate the transfer with the finger-snap, god, she’s so classy and great and badass and you can’t even believe— "You’re bringing the  _q-whale-ity_  right now.”

"Yeah," says Gamzee.  You elbow him in the guts, but there’s a big, dumb smile trying to spread over your face.  Your ears feel hot.  "Come on bro, she got it all right and all, this shit’s all different as fuck as the stuff I did before.  Better."

"— _all the time or anyfin,_ " Her Condescension is saying when you stop poking at Gamzee to make him shut up and stop making your cheeks turn red.  You turn back around, even though she can’t see you, and pretend you were listening professionally the entire time.  She’s not looking at the camera right now—she’s looking down at her hands, picking at her long nails lazily.  She looks so  _calm_ , like she could go to the ‘coon, is that because of you?  Oh god, is that because of your video?  ” _Maybe if you tide for once a perigee or so, anyplaice you got time.  whenever you need the dough just shoot me some cuttles.”_  She nods to herself—yawns, all these long, white, perfect seadweller fangs.  ”… _okay, my cute-ass little palebait minnows, this undertowtally badbass gangsta gotta get a good snooze.  Makara, buoy, get Nubby McShouts into ‘coon, y’hear?_ ”

"Got it," says Gamzee blissfully, like she can hear, and she smiles almost like she can.  

“ _I’ll be watching this again later,_ " she purrs, and then winks at you, and the video shuts off.

You stare at the money-transfer on your screen for a minute and a half before Gamzee picks you right up out of your chair, and carries you off to the ‘coon, and you fall asleep with a dumb smile on your face.


End file.
